British intelligence agency GCHQ is strongly denying claims — repeated by the White House on Thursday — that it spied on President Trump.

In a rare public statement reported across multiple media outlets, the United Kingdom’s eavesdropping agency called “utterly ridiculous” the suggestion that it tapped Trump for former President Barack Obamafollowing last year’s election.

The White House has struggled to support Trump’s assertion, first sent out on Twitter, that Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower late in 2016. On Thursday, press secretary Sean Spicer read out a series of media reports in response to a question about whether Trump would back down.

"Judge Andrew Napolitano made the following statement, quote, 'Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn't use the NSA, he didn't use the CIA ... he used GCHQ,'" Spicer said, referring to Government Communications Headquarters, the U.K. equivalent of the National Security Agency.

I hear he got from the same idiot who promoted the Michelle Obama whitey tape, that hannity will produce on his show, real soon.

Saw this great legal mind skewered so well by Jon Stewart one night, so skewered, judgeNap as he calls himself had no idea Jon didn't fall for his BS tsale about the civil war and slavery would have ended anyway.

On March 14, Napolitano appeared on Fox & Friends, claiming that Obama asked British intelligence for surveillance on Trump so it wouldn’t look like the American government was behind it, reports LawNewz. Napolitano claimed that the GCHQ, the British version of the NSA, did the heavy lifting. He also claimed that the man who ordered the surveillance “resigned three days after Trump was inaugurated.”

Napolitano didn’t say who this man was or who his sources were. However, when the New York Times tried to contact Napolitano on March 17, they instead heard from former intelligence officer Larry C. Johnson, the same former Fox News contributor who spread a 2008 hoax about Michelle Obama. Johnson told the Times that Napolitano told him to call the Times and confirm that he was one of Napolitano’s sources for the report. He claimed to have came across the information “from sources in the American intelligence community.”

On March 16, Napolitano’s claims appeared on Fox News’ website in a column, which remains unedited since it was published. However, Fox News did add a link to the GCHQ’s statement.

In his opinion piece, the former judge wrote:

Sources have told me that the British foreign surveillance service, the Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, most likely provided Obama with transcripts of Trump’s calls. The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ — a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms — has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump’s. So by bypassing all American intelligence services, Obama would have had access to what he wanted with no Obama administration fingerprints.